For bestselling author Pip Granger, London’s Soho has always been her spiritual home. While still a baby, she and her father would haunt Soho’s bars, cafes, clubs, bookshops, and snooker halls, veteran visitors of a particular community in London’s West End. It was where she felt safest, where she felt loved – where she has always called home.

There are, Pip acknowledges, other books about this part of London – but none that focus on the lives and times of ‘ordinary’ people who lived and worked in this extraordinary place in the tumulteous years following the Second World War. Based on the memories of people who lived through these years – the shop-keepers, market traders, children, ‘working girls’, those who lived on the streets and those who entertained them – “Up West” is a rich and varied tapestry of people and their memories.

It is a social history and a memoir, a testament to a once vibrant community, it is also a uniquely personal love-letter to a small corner of London and a way of life that is vanishing fast.